Pastoral coaching: life coaching as a tool for pastoral care

The purpose of this professional doctorate is to explore how life coaching was used to enhance the ministry of pastoral care, as practised within a specific Christian charity, and, in the light of this exploration, to develop a theory of pastoral coaching. This approach, in which life coaching techniques are incorporated into the discipline of pastoral care, aims to address a lack of emphasis on techniques and methods in the field of pastoral care. It is argued that this approach could be used as an additional method of pastoral care. Various types of pastoral care, as well as life coaching, are investigated through a literature review. Seven clients, who underwent this method of intervention between July 2006 and February 2009, and of whom adequate case notes were available, were selected. These seven cases consisted out of four female and three male participants and chronologically spanned the whole unit of analysis. A multiple-case study design was used to reflect retrospectively upon this work with these clients in the light of the literature review. From this reflection, a theory of pastoral coaching is developed. This theory suggests that the aim of pastoral coaching is to foster wholeness in clients. Pastoral coaching achieves this aim through using a combination of pastoral care and life coaching techniques and methods. Although pastoral coaching could be regarded as a form of supportive pastoral care, its structure is similar to that of solution-focused coaching. The five traditional functions of pastoral care, healing, sustaining, guiding, reconciling and nurturing, form five separate phases in the process of pastoral coaching as clients progress towards a greater sense of wholeness. The outcome of this research suggests that pastoral coaching could be used as an alternative method of pastoral care. This method could subsequently be used to provide pastoral care practitioners with a clear set of guidelines that is pastoral in nature, while also utilising certain life coaching techniques that could help clients practically.